Posts from hacking energy

EV sales in the US are on the rise, reaching 7% of all car sales in Q1 2023, up from 4.6% a year earlier. If that rate of growth continues, EVs will be 10% of the US car market by next year.

Most people who own an EV charge it at home, using an EV charger. Our family owns a few different models. Here are two of them.

The reason we have two chargers right next to each other is one charges our Tesla and the other charges our other EVs. It is like an iPhone and an Android. Each has its own charging cable. I expect that is going to get sorted out soon as the EV market will work a lot better with a standard charging cable.

But what is even more interesting to me is the idea of bi-directional EV charging.

Right now, EV charging is “one way”. Those chargers take power from our home (either from our solar panels or the grid) and send it to our EVs.

But it does not have to work that way. There are bi-directional chargers that can take the power from our EVs and send it to our home.

That would be very useful in the event of a power outage. But it could also be useful to supplement our solar panels at night. Imagine our solar panels filling up our EV batteries during the day when it is sunny out and our EVs powering our home at night when it is not.

This is a nice primer on the topic of bi-directional EV charging. I like this diagram from that primer.

That is the simplest version of bi-directional EV charging. That primer has a bunch more diagrams of more sophisticated versions.

As we transition from a centralized electrical grid to a decentralized electrical grid over the next few decades, storage on the edge (homes, etc) will become critical to making the transition work. And EVs are a huge source of storage that are mostly not connected to the grid right now.

That is going to change and there are lots of opportunities to build innovative services around bi-directional charging as a result.

The Gotham Gal and I make environmentally designed apartment buildings and the one we are making right now has eight parking spots in the basement. We will outfit those parking spots with bi-directional chargers so that the cars in the garage will be connected to the apartments and they can power them in the event of a power outage. We expect to be able to offer additional services to our tenants over time using this technology.

The forty years that I have worked in information technology have seen a remarkable decentralization of computing from mainframes to computers in our pockets. And that has unleashed an enormous wave of innovation. I expect we will see the same thing in the energy grid/market over the next forty years. I am really excited to witness that.

It’s 2020. Time to look forward to the decade that is upon us.

One of my favorite quotes, attributed to Bill Gates, is that people overestimate what will happen in a year and underestimate what will happen in a decade.

This is an important decade for mankind. It is a decade in which we will need to find answers to questions that hang over us like last night’s celebrations.

I am an optimist and believe in society’s ability to find the will to face our challenges and the intelligence to find solutions to them.

So, I am starting out 2020 in an optimistic mood and here are some predictions for the decade that we are now in.

1/ The looming climate crisis will be to this century what the two world wars were to the previous one. It will require countries and institutions to re-allocate capital from other endeavors to fight against a warming planet. This is the decade we will begin to see this re-allocation of capital. We will see carbon taxed like the vice that it is in most countries around the world this decade, including in the US. We will see real estate values collapse in some of the most affected regions and we will see real estate values increase in regions that benefit from the warming climate. We will see massive capital investments made in protecting critical regions and infrastructure. We will see nuclear power make a resurgence around the world, particularly smaller reactors that are easier to build and safer to operate. We will see installed solar power worldwide go from ~650GW currently to over 20,000GW by the end of this decade. All of these things and many more will cause the capital markets to focus on and fund the climate issue to the detriment of many other sectors.

2/ Automation will continue to take costs out of operating many of the services and systems that we rely on to live and be productive. The fight for who should have access to this massive consumer surplus will define the politics of the 2020s. We will see capitalism come under increasing scrutiny and experiments to reallocate wealth and income more equitably will produce a new generation of world leaders who ride this wave to popularity.

3/ China will emerge as the world’s dominant global superpower leveraging its technical prowess and ability to adapt quickly to changing priorities (see #1). Conversely the US becomes increasingly internally focused and isolationist in its world view.

4/ Countries will create and promote digital/crypto versions of their fiat currencies, led by China who moves first and benefits the most from this move. The US will be hamstrung by regulatory restraints and will be slow to move, allowing other countries and regions to lead the crypto sector. Asian crypto exchanges, unchecked by cumbersome regulatory restraints in Europe and the US and leveraging decentralized finance technologies, will become the dominant capital markets for all types of financial instruments.

5/ A decentralized internet will emerge, led initially by decentralized infrastructure services like storage, bandwidth, compute, etc. The emergence of decentralized consumer applications will be slow to take hold and a killer decentralized consumer app will not emerge until the latter part of the decade.

6/ Plant based diets will dominate the world by the end of the decade. Eating meat will become a delicacy, much like eating caviar is today. Much of the world’s food production will move from farms to laboratories.

7/ The exploration and commercialization of space will be dominated by private companies as governments increasingly step back from these investments. The early years of this decade will produce a wave of hype and investment in the space business but returns will be slow to come and we will be in a trough of disillusionment on the space business as the decade comes to an end.

8/ Mass surveillance by governments and corporations will become normal and expected this decade and people will increasingly turn to new products and services to protect themselves from surveillance. The biggest consumer technology successes of this decade will be in the area of privacy.

9/ We will finally move on from the Baby Boomers dominating the conversation in the US and around the world and Millennials and Gen-Z will be running many institutions by the end of the decade. Age and experience will be less valued by shareholders, voters, and other stakeholders and vision and courage will be valued more.

10/ Continued advancements in genetics will produce massive wins this decade as cancer and other terminal illnesses become well understood and treatable. Fertility and reproduction will be profoundly changed. Genetics will also create new diseases and moral/ethical issues that will confound and confuse society. Balancing the gains and losses that come from genetics will be our greatest challenge in this decade.

That’s ten predictions, enough for now and enough for me. I hope I made you think as much as I made myself think writing this. That’s the goal. It is impossible to be right about all of this. But it is important to be thinking about it.

I know that comments here at AVC are broken at the moment and so I look forward to the conversation on email and Twitter and elsewhere.

The devices in our homes are getting smart. That is awesome. We can manage our energy consumption and much more with a lot more precision and intelligence now.

But I find myself logging into one app to get data on my thermostats, another to get data on my security system, another to get data on my solar panels, and another to get data on my electric vehicles. And then there is all of the billing data from the various utilities and other providers we have.

It’s a bit of a production each month when I want to see how we are doing. And I use a spreadsheet to collect and analyze all of this data.

It makes me wonder if there is a Yodlee or Plaid for smart home data and if there is a Mint-like application that pulls it all together for you.

Of course I could go do the homework to figure that on my own, but I assume I’m not the only person in the AVC community who has this need. So it’s better for me to blog this question here and we can all find the answer in the comments.

And if there is no good answer, well then that is a good startup opportunity.

During Hurricane Sandy, all of lower Manhattan lost power for several days when a transformer blew at a ConEd plant on 14th Street.

Driving around lower Manhattan at night in the aftermath of Sandy was one of the strangest moments I’ve experienced as a NY’er. The traffic lights didn’t work and everything was pitch black.

Except NYU. As you approached Washington Square the city lit up again. That is because NYU has its own power plant, a cogeneration facility next to NYU’s Courant Institute.

Similarly, when the west side of Manhattan went dark a few weeks ago in what is turning into a summer of blackouts, everything was pitch black except the new Hudson Yards development. That’s because on the top of the Hudson Yards Shopping Mall, there is a massive cogeneration facility that powers all of buildings in that development.

So when I heard Mayor de Blasio ruminating over the weekend about a government takeover of ConEd, I thought to myself “he’s got it all wrong.”

We don’t need more centralized control of our power grid, we need a more decentralized power grid.

NY State has been pushing in this direction for years now under the leadership of Richard Kauffman, Chairman of the New York State Energy Research and Development Authority (NYSERDA). The state has deregulated the energy markets, they have created substantial incentives for property owners to build out renewable (solar/battery/etc) capacity in their buildings, and they have put forth a vision of an energy grid that is not reliant on any one entity to stay up.

Back in the 1960s when the Department of Defense designed ARPANET, the precursor to the modern Internet, they designed a network that was entirely decentralized and therefore massively resilient (anti-fragile in Nassim Taleb speak).

That should be our goal with our energy grid as well. We should want energy production and consumption to happen at the edges of the network and we should want redundancy in the cables that connect everything together.

We aren’t there today and it will take a lot of work over many years to get there. But that should be our goal.

And we certainly should not be putting our energy system into the hands of a centralized and bureaucratic government. That would lead to more blackouts, not less.

My colleague Dani sent me this chart last week:

I believe this is more or less a proxy for smart wifi-enabled thermostats in the US.

Those would be Nest, Honeywell Lyric, Hive thermostats and a lot of others too.

Those are pretty big jumps from 6.5% to 8.9% to 11.4% given that people don’t generally swap out thermostats unless they are doing a renovation or building a new home. Maybe there is more thermostat swapping going on outside of those “construction” moments than I would expect.

In a few years, more than 20% of homes will have heating and cooling systems that can be “managed” by software, either on-premises or, more likely, in the cloud.

That is pretty exciting.

I wonder what level of adoption is “critical mass” or “escape velocity” ?

Certainly 50% would be, maybe 25% will be.

I really like the area of networks, platforms, and protocols that will allow us to efficiently manage our energy consumption. It has been hindered to date by a closed “last mile”, but that is changing and I think the opportunity is approaching.

The lawmakers in Albany have passed legislation known as the Climate and Community Protection Act (CCPA) and it is sitting on the Governor’s desk awaiting signature.

There is plenty of debate on whether CCPA is good policy or bad policy. All you need to do is Google “New York’s Climate and Community Protection Act” and read the NY Post (against) and the NY Daily News (for) and you will see the various sides of the debate.

What this bill does is commit New York State to some of the most agressive goals of any city, state, or region:

This is a legally binding legislative act to achieve an 85% reduction in greenhouse gas emissions by 2050 and a goal of net zero.

My view is that we need ambitious goals like this and penalties for not reaching them (the stick).

But we also need new policies and new funding/investment to allow us to reach them (the carrot).

Most of the “green new deal” style legislation that is getting passed in NYC, NYS, and elsewhere, and being proposed in many other places, is long on sticks and short on carrots.

I believe CCPA is a good first step for NYS and I hope the Governor signs it into law.

But legislators and activists and the business community should not stop there. We need to follow these goal setting/penalty setting laws with more work around how we get there and there are many good ideas floating around on how to do that.

As hard as if has been to get CCPA done, I think the hard work is just starting because reaching these goals will require creativity, innovation, new technology, and a massive amount of investment and the willpower to see it through.

We really don’t have a choice. So let’s go.

I saw this project earlier this week and backed it immediately. Solar energy is not easy to adopt. But I have found that once you start, you get into it and keep going.

This might make it easier for some to start down that path.

We have had an order in for Tesla Solar Roof Tiles for almost two years, since they were announced back in 2017. Production delays and other issues have meant that we still don’t have them on our roof.

And they are more expensive than a regular roof plus traditional solar panels on the roof. But they look a lot better in my view.

This video explains all of that, and more, along with some helpful cost comparisons.

The Gotham Gal and I are investors in Blueprint Power, a company that helps landlords turn their buildings into mini power plants.

Robyn Beavers, the CEO of Blueprint, was on the Gotham Gal’s podcast this past week. They talked about how Robyn spent fifteen years working in the tech, energy, and real estate industries and took all of those work experiences and combined them into the idea for Blueprint. They also talk about how the changing supply and demand for energy is opening up new revenue streams for property owners and how Blueprint enables that.